I am using Windows 7 professional edition. I googled for BOINC, and got many hits, but need a good reliable site for the BOINC Client. If I am able to download install and the subscribe to the Sixtrack and Garfield projects and run them without any major problems, I may suggest it to the entire physics forum user community, of which there are thousands of members, obviously only after consulting with the owner of the site first. I want to be the guinea pig first though. I see this as one small way I can assist in supporting the collection of the LHC data. As always, thanks in advance.

Ok, downloaded installed Boinc, joined LHC Home created user profile and set preferences to run late evening to early morning. Is this all is necessary to have my PC used for Sixtrack, and Garfield simulations ?

From the History of LHC Home page:

Alex Owen and Neasan O'Neill at Queen Mary were the new administrators and preparations were made to hand over to them and move the service to London in early 2007. After months of getting to know the system and buying new kit the 1st of June 2007 was the first official day of LHC@home running from London and in July of 2007 the website got a makeover.

Since the move the project has been kept busy crunching plenty of SixTrack work units for the scientists but there is work going on behind the scenes to get more work units new applications. The main work, currently, is looking at the Garfield application which will simulate the detectors being used at the LHC. The team behind LHC@home are still for even more new applications to port on to BOINC and hope to have some announcements to keep all the volunteers happy in 2008.

From this information is it fair to assume that my PC will be used for Sixtrack, and or Garfield use ?

As always, thanks in advance...

Rhody...

P.S. Want to see how things fare before I recommend any of this to the Physics Forum folks.

Well I after leaving BOINC on my computer for a couple of days running under Windows 7 Home, and after registering with LHC@Home I can say one thing for sure, it shuts my computer down after about 30 minutes of being idle with 100% certainty. Can anyone direct me to a reliable source and not a FAQ page to isolate and fix this problem.

FYI, I run PC Tools Spyware Dr on my machine with no issues, I don't think a conflict between BOINC and the anti-virus software is an issue, but I have learned over the years to never say never.

Thanks in advance, I would really like to see if I can clear up this issue that I can be of some meager assistance to the LHC effort.

I know this may sound obvious and/or patronising, but were you able to leave your PC idle for half an hour before you installed the LHC@Home software? Even if you were it might just be worth checking your power options anyway

On Windows 7, type Power Options into the start menu search box, or right click the battery icon and choose power options if you're running on a laptop

Yeah power options are not the issue, I have left it on overnight many times before installing BOINC, and once I uninstalled BOINC the PC stayed up just fine, only with BOINC installed at configured for LHCHome did I run into this issue of it shutting down (abnormally I might add).

I remembered that installing BOINC the first time I got a weird error that may have been the cause of the problem in the first place, I downloaded and installed it again, this time without a hitch, that was a relief, and ran overnight. This time the PC stayed up.

I updated the profile to use no more than 50% of the CPU for unused times and this morning noticed that jobs were suspended to lack of available resources. I recently had a heat problem with my PC and had the heat sink face cleaned and reapplyed the silver lube to ensure the heat would tranfer properly. I was hesitant to give the software at LHC@Home 100% of the CPU for fear of the heat problems returning. That being said I plan to try 80% this evening to see if at least one work package can complete. Any other advice on BOINC setup/configuration is most welcome.

If jobs were suspended for lack of resources it was most probably not due to your settings. Either you had internet outage overnight or something is running in your PC using CPU with higher priority than BOINC has. Running out of disk space is also an option, make sure you have more free space on your disk than you have configured for BOINC.

I upped most of my preferences and as of right now not getting any tasks to work on. What is the standard operating procedure(s) for distro of these tasks to the BOINC Network ? BTW I joined this forum for AMD users, is it a good one ? http://amdusers.com/forum/forum.php

The BOINC client is requesting new tasks every 15 minutes.

Better yet where can I look to see what tasks are scheduled to verify in fact that I am working correctly with LHC@Home.

At the time when I was experimenting with BOINC there were no LHC workunits too - they used it to calculate orbit parameters and were done with it at the time. I guess current event rate is not enough to make busy their server farm and it's probably easier for them to process data on their own hardware.
While waiting for LHC jobs you can take a look at other BOINC projects. I remember spending some CPU on protein folding was fun.

Well I attached to Einstein@home and was running workpackage's on both CPU's watching the utilization, quite clever actually they use 100% and then cycle every few seconds to around 10% so I know the Boinc client runs correctly, however I have been having a heat problem and after 30 minutes my power supply overheated and due to the fact I have a mini case (the CPU sits underneath it with a large heat sink) the heat being given off by the two processors was too much and it simply shit down. I held my hand to the back of the case immediately after and it was very warm. Funny thing is we have had it apart, put new silver grease on the cpu/heat sink mount and checked the fans and all seems well. I have to try to pin this problem down. My PC (homegrown) is only a little over a year old, and only started having heat problems in the past month, swapped other power supply and within a few days the overheat power supply shutdown happened again.

The good news is I know that Boinc and the client software when downloaded runs as it should, at least from Einstein@home.

The problem I had while running BOINC which in the end made me uninstall it was priority inversion. BOINC runs at low priority but certain tasks in windows run at the same or even lower priorities. I am not exactly sure what but I guess they are indexation services or e.g. language check in Word. When BOINC is running these have hard time to catch up and the problem is that foreground high priority tasks sometimes wait for them to finish. The result was that even though BOINC was running at low priority the computer felt more or less sluggish. Now I know that it is also possible to set up BOINC to only run after some inactivity time but in that case I'd have to intentionally leave the PC running just to give BOINC some processing time and that doesn't match with how I use computers - I prefer having them switched off while I'm not at them.